New Delhi: Weeks after being voted back to power, the Narendra Modi government extended the tenure of Intelligence Bureau (IB) chief Tapan Kumar Deka, an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer of the 1988 batch, for one year.
Deka, an officer of the Himachal Pradesh cadre, had been appointed as the IB chief in 2022 for a period of two years, and will now serve in this position until 2025.
The order came days after the government reappointed P.K. Mishra and Ajit Doval as principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and as national security adviser (NSA), respectively — appointments that are conterminous with the term of the prime minister.
In addition, the government also reappointed Amit Khare and Tarun Kapoor as advisers to the PM — giving a firm message of continuity in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in the Modi government’s third term, albeit in coalition with other parties this time.
Last week, Rajesh Kotecha, secretary in the AYUSH ministry since 2017, also got his third extension since his appointment.
While the PMO appointments are political in nature since the officers have already retired from service and are re-employed by the government, since its second term, the Modi government has had a penchant for giving extensions to serving officers way beyond their stipulated retirement.
Even now, some of the top officers serving in the government are doing so much beyond their stipulated tenures in service.
Consider these. Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba, the country’s top civil servant, is a 1982-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer who has already got three extensions, making him the longest-serving cabinet secretary in the history of India.
Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla, an officer of the 1984 batch, is the second longest-serving home secretary in Indian history. Since his appointment to the post in August 2019, a fortnight after the Centre scrapped Jammu & Kashmir’s special status and bifurcated it into two Union Territories, Bhalla has been given four extensions.
Foreign secretary Vinay Kwatra, an officer of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), was supposed to retire in March 2024 when he was given a six-month extension citing “public interest”.
Aramane Giridhar, a 1988-batch IAS officer who took over as defence secretary in November 2022, was given a year-long extension last year. His extended tenure is due to end in October 2024.
In June 2022, 1986-batch Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer Nitin Gupta was appointed chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), the apex policymaking body for the Income Tax Department. In September 2023, Gupta, too, was given a nine-month extension on a “contract basis”. Gupta’s extension is until the end of this month.
In September last year, the government appointed Rahul Navin in-charge director of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) till a regular director was picked. This came after the Supreme Court came down heavily on the Centre for granting repeated extensions to then ED director Sanjay Kumar Mishra, asking if the whole department was “full of incompetent people” except for Mishra. However, since then, the government has not appointed a full-time director for the ED.
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‘Stability’ and ‘continuity’
From “clarity” in decision-making and “stability” in policymaking to having a “clear chain of command” — the trend of extensions has been justified by government sources on several accounts for the last few years.
“A lot of these extensions were given keeping in view the elections because you do not want a change of guard in important ministries or departments when the country is going into elections,” a secretary-level official told ThePrint on the condition of anonymity. “The defence and foreign secretaries, for instance, were given extensions of a few months, and those are quite common.”
However, since its last term, the Modi government has preferred retaining officers beyond their retirement for the sake of purported continuity in policymaking.
“Trust, stability, consistency — all of these are factors that go into giving extensions to officers,” said the same officer. “It is for the same reason that the government is now ensuring that officers with at least two-three years of service left are appointed as secretaries in order to ensure that there can be continuity in policymaking.”
Earlier, the trend of having secretaries for just a few months was “deeply detrimental” to policymaking, the official added.
Flouting of service rules, ‘demoralising effect’
However, the spate of extensions has understandably led to unease among officers waiting in line to be appointed to important positions, such as cabinet secretary or home secretary. Moreover, it undermines the All India Services Rules, by which the terms of service of all officers are governed.
According to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) rules, “No proposal for extension of service/re-employment beyond the age of superannuation should ordinarily be considered.”
Further, the rules state: “Extension of service/re-employment can be justified only in very rare and exceptional circumstances.”
Extensions can be justified only when other officers are “not ripe enough” for the job or the officer in question is of “outstanding merit”. Both these conditions need to be sufficiently established for an extension to be granted to a retiring officer.
“The rules clearly state that you should extend the service of an officer only when no other officer of equal caliber is available,” said K.B.S. Sidhu, a retired IAS officer. “For a cadre-based system like the IAS and IPS, where officers keep coming and going, it is very detrimental to the morale and smooth career progression of the cadres when you keep extending the services of a few officers.”
“Even earlier under the UPA (United Progressive Alliance government), there used to be extensions, but they were much rarer, and in most of the cases, the government would institutionalise them by creating fixed-tenure rules like in the case of the cabinet secretary, home, finance, defence secretaries, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) chief, etc.,” Sidhu added.
To be sure, in November 2021, the second Modi government, too, issued a notification to institutionalise extensions in certain departments. The defence secretary, the home secretary, the director of the IB and the secretary of the Research and Analysis Wing, the notification said, can be given extensions of up to two years if needed.
The order came a day after the Centre brought in the ordinance extending the tenure of the chiefs of the ED and the CBI for up to five years.
Yet, the extensions have a demoralising effect on the larger bureaucracy, former IAS officer Anil Swarup told ThePrint.
“Every officer who reaches a certain level in any service — IAS, IPS, IFS, IRS — aspires to be the cabinet secretary, the foreign secretary or the CBDT chairman,” he said. “When you keep giving extensions to a select few officers, those aspirations get hit.”
Moreover, it sends the signal that the bureaucracy must be “totally compliant”, Swarup added. “There is nothing wrong if you upfront extend the service of a certain officer who you think has exceptionally high caliber by four years… but to give these annual contract-like extensions sends out a very problematic message to the bureaucracy.”
A serving officer, who wished for anonymity, agreed. “It upends the whole logic of the system of the bureaucracy, which is a running system, in which officers keep coming and going… to have this permanent bureaucracy is concerning,” he said.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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